Advances in pharmaceutical technology have led to major improvements in modern healthcare. New pharmaceuticals have been designed to fight bacterial infections, disease, mental disorders, and a variety of other medical conditions. However, many of these pharmaceuticals require very carefully controlled conditions to be effective. For example, although drug “cocktails” or combinations have been very successful in extending the lives and lifestyles of many HIV-positive patients, the drugs often have very complicated protocols. Moreover, failure to follow all of the indications can greatly reduce the efficacy of these drugs.
More problematic still are antibacterial drugs that often have required patients to take the medication for weeks or even months. In these cases, the failure to follow a course of medication to its completion, particularly for bacterial infections, can and does frequently lead to the generation of drug-resistant strains of these bacteria, which in turn require the development of ever more sophisticated drugs.
To address these problems hospitals often turn to in-house dosage routines, which either require a patient to come into the hospital to receive their medication, or require close supervision of the patient throughout the treatment by a healthcare professional. Not only is this practice costly and time-consuming, its success depends on the availability of a large numbers of healthcare professionals. The September 11th terrorist attacks and the anthrax mail attacks on many government agencies around the country, and the subsequent struggles the public health system faced in delivering medication to all the exposed postal personnel, demonstrated the all too real possibility that healthcare disasters either natural or man-made could easily overwhelm the public health system leading to tragic lapses in medication delivery.
The possibility of the public health system being faced with hundreds of thousands, or possible millions, of individuals exposed to either biological or chemical attacks makes it apparent that a system is needed to provide for the remote delivery and monitoring of a patient's medication and overall condition.